Csaba Henk wrote:
> On 2005-01-15, Thursday <nospam / nospam.nospam.nospam.nospam.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>>oops
>>
>>ruby1.8 provides these (incliding libzlib-ruby1.8):
>>
>>ri1.8, ruby1.8-dev, libsdbm-ruby1.8, libtcltk-ruby1.8, ruby1.8, 
>>libruby1.8, libsyslog-ruby1.8, libdl-ruby1.8, libstrscan-ruby1.8, 
>>irb1.8, libdbm-ruby1.8, libiconv-ruby1.8, libzlib-ruby1.8, 
>>libtk-ruby1.8, libreadline-ruby1.8, libxmlrpc-ruby1.8, libyaml-ruby1.8, 
>>libruby1.8-dbg, rdoc1.8, libwebrick-ruby1.8, libtest-unit-ruby1.8, 
>>libpty-ruby1.8, libracc-runtime-ruby1.8, libgdbm-ruby1.8, 
>>librexml-ruby1.8, libbigdecimal-ruby1.8, ruby1.8-examples, 
>>ruby1.8-elisp, libsoap-ruby1.8, libdrb-ruby1.8, libcurses-ruby1.8, 
>>liberb-ruby1.8, libopenssl-ruby1.8
> 
> 
> Uh... This is why I switched to Gentoo. :)
> [no distro religious war inflammation indeeded]
> 
> Csab

It turns out that I didn't need to bother with all the equivs crap.  My 
ignorance shouldn't penalize Debian.

I could simply do:

# apt-get source ruby1.8
# cd ruby1.8-1.8.2
# vim debian/rules  #if we want to tweak the default configuration
# dpkg-buildpackage

I switched away from Gentoo after an emerge update broke my system.  But 
this was around Dec 2003 so Gentoo is probably a lot more stable by now. 
  I'll probably reinstall Gentoo in Dec 2005 on a desktop to see how 
things have progressed when I have faster machines (it is painful even 
with distcc).